After three spectacularly mild and sunny days we leave New York just as it starts raining. In New Jersey we negotiate with some cheerful Caribbean characters to find the perfect car. At one point we are offered a deal on a large and powerful Volvo. I personally happen to love Volvos but to me it is simply not the right car for a coast to coast US roadtrip. More to the point, knowing Egon’s national pride, he would refuse to even sit in it. I explain patiently to the man from Saint Thomas that Norwegians simply cannot go on a roadtrip in the US in a Swedish car. This is not done. After this and several other misunderstandings which I will not go into here, we finally locate the perfect car. A ridiculously massive battlecruiser of a car. A car big enough to sink an iceberg, should we hit one. A Lincoln Town Car with a five liter V8. This is the kind of car that if you’re important enough, you sit in the back seat. We head south on the Garden State Parkway.

As if to test the mettle of our battleship, we are hit with torrential downpours, like biblical-style sheets of water coming down. I think I can see pairs of animals lining up in the fields. Egon comments that he always thought that heavy rain in the movies looked fake, because he didn’t think this much water could come out of the sky all at once. The Lincoln ploughs through it impassively.

The rain clears up gradually. The wonders of mobile telephony have allowed us to rendezvous with my excellent friend Jeff, a desert nomad swordsmith driving north from Baltimore on the same day we happen to be driving south from New York.

We hook up at about two o’clock in the afternoon in Atlantic City, at the Baltimore Grill, an unprepossessing establishment. Locals unwind here, including casino workers, but we’ve missed the lunch crowd and the place is mostly empty, the staff idle. Some regulars are sitting out front having a post-lunch smoke and watching the traffic go by. In the dark interior, there is a nicotine patina on all the formica surfaces, and ancient mini-jukeboxes still play Frank Sinatra right into your booth if you drop in a quarter and punch their bakelite buttons just so.

I’m the one with the water

 

Jeff and I sit down in a booth while Egon heads to the powder room. A beehived waitress comes over and greets us heartily, and asks us what we would like to drink. I haven’t looked at the menu (the usual panoply of burgers, pizza, etc.) so I tell her I would like to start with some water. This doesn’t compute at all. It is as if I have asked her for yak butter. She seems to think that the conversation has gotten off on the wrong foot. She asks if I like vodka. Apparently she is eager to get me started with a nice house specialty vodka-based cocktail but is willing to settle for anything based on house liquor. I have three more hours of driving for the day and having been sufficiently Norwegianized am no longer certain that vodka cocktails for lunch would improve my driving. So I try to set the issue aside saying, no, I think I’ll just have a look at the menu, but I’d love some water in the meantime. The waitress can’t seem to accept that as a sensible response, pointing out almost accusatorily that Jeff is having a cocktail. She hasn’t made any motion to get the water I asked for, as if that wasn’t a credible request. It’s like she suspects me of being on the wagon and is determined to help me fall off. I’m struggling to think of an excuse, and eventually she does produce some water, and finally Egon comes back to the table and she diverts her attention to this surely more reasonable person. Egon, much to her consternation, also wants to study the menu first. The waitress again suggests a vodka drink. Egon looks positively distressed at the thought, and protests that it is too early in the day for liquor, whereupon the waitress looks truly baffled, like perhaps there is something wrong with us and she might want to get the bartender to come escort us to the sidewalk. Jeff helpfully offers in an explanatory tone that the two of us are foreigners, which she seems to accept, as if some things are just too inscrutable to deal with. After further negotiations, Egon manages to settle for a beer, and eventually we also get some pretty decent pizza, with a nice tomato sauce and no skimping on the cheese or toppings.